SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon.com got "Blodget-like" price targets from some of Wall Street's top Internet analysts Friday after quarterly results increased hope that the world's largest Internet retailer is starting to show signs of profitability.

That sent Amazon shares to a new record in Friday trading, valuing the company at more than $160 billion.

Mark Mahaney of RBC Capital Markets, ranked the no. 1 Internet analyst for the past five years by Institutional Investor, lifted his price target on Amazon shares to $425 from $330 based on re-acceleration in revenue growth and gross profit margin expansion.

"$425 Price Target feels Blodget-like and carries risk, but the inflection point in Amazon's fundamentals seems clear," Mahaney wrote in a note to investors Friday.

Mahaney was referring to Henry Blodget, a former top technology analyst who predicted that Amazon shares would hit a pre-stock-split price of $400 in October 1998, during the height of the first dot-com boom. The shares more than doubled to hit that target one month later.

Mahaney was not the only analyst pulling a Blodget Friday. Carlos Kirjner, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, raised his price target on Amazon shares to $420.

"We expect to see margin expansion in 2014," Kirjner wrote in a note to investors.

Amazon reported strong third-quarter results late Thursday. Gross profit margins, a closely watched measure of the company's profits that exclude a lot of different costs, jumped 2.4 percentage points to 27.7% in the period, compared to a year earlier.

That was the highest gross margin since the 1990's, Mahaney noted.

Amazon is likely benefiting from economies of scale, lower shipping expenses and a shift to more profitable new businesses such as Amazon Web Services' cloud computing offerings, the marketplace for third-party merchants and sales of digital media such as music, video, apps and games, Mahaney said.

Amazon shares jumped 7.8% to $358.06 in early afternoon trading Friday. The stock hit a record $368.40 earlier in the day.